ROSALIND MILES

Rosalind Miles is a graduate of Oxford University, has a doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute and is the author of 23 books of fiction and non-fiction.

Dr. Miles is the winner of the Network Award for outstanding achievement in the field of writing for women, and has been designated an Alien of Extraordinary Ability by the US Department of State.

She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Honorary Fellow of the University of Kent, and a founder contributor of The Literary Review, Working Woman UK and Prospect Magazine.

Translated into almost 40 foreign languages The Women's History of the World was a top ten bestseller in the UK and the US (Michael Joseph, UK, 1988; Salem House, US, 1989). It was awarded the non-fiction prize for the Best Foreign Title at the Gothenburg Book Fair, voted Best Book in its field by the American Historical Association and listed among the top 10 best-ever women’s titles by the London Book Fair.

She is the author of the international best-seller, I, Elizabeth, a historical novel of Queen Elizabeth I in her own words.

Her The Women’s History of the Modern World will be published by Virago in the UK and William Morrow in the US in 2017.

She lives in Kent with her husband, the author Robin Cross.

LATEST BOOK: THE WOMEN’S HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD

Twenty-five years ago The Women’s History of the World, by the brilliant historian, journalist and academic, Rosalind Miles, burst upon the world. It was instantly lauded and applauded by everyone from A.S. Byatt (‘Witty, balanced, inexorable ….and splendid’) to the Washington Post (‘an inspiration’). The book went on to be a longstanding Sunday Times bestseller, was translated into almost 40 foreign languages and became a New York Times US bestseller under the sporting title of Who Cooked The Last Supper? In all these years it has never been echoed or imitated, let alone surpassed. Dr. Miles book has continued to substantially add to the feminist argument for the last twenty-five years. But in that time, the argument itself has changed.

If The Women’s History of the World was a myth-busting ice-breaker of history at the time, for women now there are many new myths to combat and arctic oceans of new ice to break in their voyage through this old/new world of today. It is time for a new appraisal - The Women’s History of the Modern World. This entirely new book will look again at the central question - why women’s history? From there, it conducts a critical examination of how women have fared in what history calls the modern age. The last two hundred years have witnessed the worst and greatest social upheavals in the history of the world, war, revolution, and genocide, mass murder on an industrial scale. At the same time, women have made greater advances than in all the previous ages of the human record.

The Women’s History of the Modern World will examine the progress of events and the roles of women as they emerged from millennia of silence and suppression to play their part in every modern movement as it unfurled. Brave, brilliant, unrivalled in its wit and erudition, The Women’s History of theModern World will not only be a hugely readable book, but also a very important one - a book which everyone concerned with a woman’s place in the world will want to read.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Wiomen's History of the World, HarperCollins, UK 1988, US 1989; I, Elizabeth, HarperCollins, 2001.